In the spring of 203, a new era in human happiness began. A young North African woman was taken into custody by Roman soldiers in Carthage, in modern Tunisia. Her name? Perpetua, 22 years old, from a good family, educated, married and nursing a child. She and a small group of companions, including her personal slave, Felicitas, defied the emperor’s decree forbidding conversion to Christ. They were promptly rewarded with a violent death.

On March 7, Perpetua, Felicity and their group was fed to wild animals, mauled, Continue Reading

A friend told me he had been to a blog which featured a section called, “How I Pray.” He added that another friend of mine, Steve Greydanus, a film critic whom I interview regularly, had challenged me to write a similar column. When I said that sounded a bit strange, he said it would be even stranger not to respond, since apparently this blog feature was getting a lot of traction.

The first question was: “What is your prayer routine for an average day?”

Questions about my personal prayer life make me anxious for two reasons. First, Jesus Continue Reading

Advocates of euthanasia, or “Death with Dignity,” say their cause is all about reducing the suffering of a sick person and their family. They argue that by allowing patients to die “on their own terms,” euthanasia eliminates the suffering of all involved. Wesley Smith disagrees. A true dignified death can be realized by eliminating the suffering, not the sufferer.

From a cheesy bit of anonymous fan fiction with vapid characters, ludicrous plot and insipid writing, “Fifty Shades of Grey” morphed into a Harry Potter-size marketing phenomenon. When the dust settles, however, we’ll discover it was little more than a self-generated, incestuous bit of media marketing foreplay without the grand socio-sexual climax promised by its boosters or prophesied by its critics.

The “Fifty Shades” franchise is a marketing windfall, but a cultural dud. One can Continue Reading

Two weeks ago, I asked a crowd of 650 educated Catholic CEOs and their spouses if they had ever seen Osama bin Laden’s 1998 Declaration of War, in which he quotes the Qur’an against U.S. actions in Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Not a single hand went up. This result would be repeated in almost every gathering of American Catholics in spite of the easy access we have to these documents online or in print.

Fourteen years after 9/11, we remain stunningly ignorant of what former British Prime Continue Reading

Martin Luther King Jr. is a hero to most Americans. Every child is taught to look up to, if not revere, him. Every rights movement polishes itself with some of King’s shine.

But, given King’s almost universal stature as a modern saint for secularists and Christians alike, we do well to remember that he was, like the rest of us, deeply flawed. His gifts of courage and leadership, as has been said, coexisted with the intellectual sin of plagiarism and the marital sin of adultery. What do we Continue Reading

It’s late December, and the close of another year. Of what have we been concerned, and what have we learned, in 2014?

Torture: Senate Democrats recently released a report criticizing the CIA for using “torture” to extract information from detainees. The debate revolved around the definition of “torture.” The debate is an old one.

World War I, the “Great War,” experimented with new destructive devices: machine Continue Reading